The Mission of Theater Previews at Duke
Theater Previews at Duke is the professional producing arm of the Duke University Department of Theater Studies. A laboratory for the professional development and production of new works on Duke's campus, Theater Previews gives students opportunities to work with playwrights, composers, actors, directors, designers, managers, and technicians and to participate in the creation of a new work of professional theater. Guest professionals from all over the country converge on campus to write, develop, and rehearse the new works, followed by performances.
Our most recent workshop project was Going After Alice by Megan Mostyn-Brown, a member of the LAByrinth Theater Company in New York. LAByrinth is headed by actors John Ortiz and Philip Seymour Hoffman and is one of New York City's most critically acclaimed Off-Broadway theater companies. Mostyn-Brown was in residence during rehearsals and accomplished significant rewrites of her play. Two professional actors from New York, Didi O’Connell and Charles Goforth, came in to anchor the production and were joined by student actors. Students also assisted in directing and management. Professor Jody McAuliffe directed Going After Alice, the story of a family coping with the loss of a soldier son in Iraq. A staged reading took place in Sheafer Theater in the Bryan Center on West Campus, April 20, 2008.
A Brief History
Emanuel Azenberg, a Tony-award-winning producer, and playwright Neil Simon were instrumental in bringing professional theater to Duke in the mid-1980s and in helping Duke develop and formalize the student internship program associated with it. The internships provided students with first-hand experience working in all aspects of a professional production. The program they started was called Broadway Previews and it premiered new works for the American theater from 1986-1993 at Duke.The first Broadway Preview performance staged in the Reynolds Industries Theater (March 10, 1986) was Azenberg's Broadway production of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night, starring Jack Lemmon and Kevin Spacey. Some of the other productions previewed at Duke are: Broadway Bound and Laughter on the 23rd Floor by Neil Simon; A Month of Sundays with Jason Robards; A Walk in the Woods with Sam Waterston; Metamorphosis with Mikhail Baryshnikov; The Circle with Rex Harrison; Artist Descending a Staircase by Tom Stoppard; and Lucifer's Child with Julie Harris.
Theater Previews at Duke continued the work of the Broadway Preview series. Theater Previews' most recent mainstage production was The Great Game in 2007. The theatrical concert reading of Gore Vidal's On the March to the Sea, starring Michael Learned, Charles Durning, and Chris Noth was staged in the spring of 2005. In the fall of 2004, Little Women - the Musical was developed at Duke and had a successful three-week run on its way to the Virginia Theatre on Broadway.
Other mainstage productions have included Kudzu, a musical based on the popular cartoon by the late Pulitzer Prize winner Doug Marlette; Eleanor: An American Love Story, a musical based on Eleanor Roosevelt's early life; and Birdy, a play adapted by Naomi Wallace from the 1978 novel by William Wharton. The 2001 production, A Thousand Clowns by Herb Gardner and starring Tom Selleck, played to sold-out audiences at Duke before touring to Chicago and Boston and opening on Broadway in July 2001. Paper Doll by Mark Hampton and Barbara J. Zitwer, directed by Leonard Foglia, and starring Marlo Thomas and F. Murray Abraham, followed in 2002.
Other workshop productions that have been produced by Theater Previews at Duke are Ariel Dorfman's Purgatorio in Winter 2005, which played in Reynolds Theater, and a professional workshop of Some Things That Can Go Wrong at 35,000 Ft. by John Orlock and directed by Michael Parva, which played at Sheafer Theater in Spring 2004. Other developmental productions have included new works by Nilo Cruz, José Rivera, and Tina Landau, and Little Women - The Musical in workshop form.
Professional Affiliations
Theater Previews is a constituent of Theatre Communications Group (TCG), the national organization for the nonprofit professional theatre and a member of the National Alliance for Musical Theatre. Theater Previews operates under agreements with Actors' Equity Association (the union of professional actors and stage managers in the United States) and the Society of Stage Directors and Choreographers (an independent national labor union).
Questions about Theater Previews at Duke should be directed to Theater Studies Department Chair Jeff Storer at jmsheepdog@gmail.com.
